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From: Richmond <dnomhcir@gmx.com>
Newsgroups: comp.mobile.android
Subject: Re: Cell phone tracking
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2025 16:28:41 +0100
Organization: Frantic
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Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> writes:

> Carlos E.R. wrote:
>
>> D wrote:
>>>> Anonymous  <nobody@yamn.paranoici.org> wrote:
>>>>>> I just heard an engineer describing how phones are doing something new
>>>> now in tracking people.  Some phones today (probably android and apple)
>>>> are continuing to track you after you turn the phone off and store the
>>>> data on your phone.  When you turn them back on, the phone then sends
>>>> the tracking data to a server.  The only way to defeat this is to put
>>>> your phone into a faraday bag, most that don't work.
>> This is ridiculous.
> For the moment agree, but there's a grain of truth behind it ... There
> have always been the tin-foil hat brigade, who claim phones are never
> really "off", but these days that's actually true for certain phones.
>
> In the name of making lost devices findable, the last act of turning a
> phone "off" or the battery getting low, is that is notes its location,
> pre-generates some beacon frames with (encrypted?) details of its id
> and location, then it activates a low power background CPU which
> periodically wakes up, and transmits those beacons over bluetooth, in
> the hope that a passing device hears them, and forwards them to the
> mothership.
>
> Now, I don't claim that this background activity is actively gathering
> location info while off, but we're no longer a million miles from
> that, and "off" no longer means literally off ...

How does one verify that this is, or is not, happening?

And why did this thread which started in a different newsgroup appear
here?